A team lead by Tatsuya Amano of the University of Queensland, Australia, examined 333 documents on biodiversity in 37 countries or territories where English is not the official language. Academic publications or gray literature (government or corporate documents not controlled by commercial publishers) written in languages other than English constituted 65% of the references cited and considered important by the authors. As a result, “local and regional information may be being ignored in important international reports, such as those issued by the IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services],” says Milton Aurelio Uba de Andrade Junior, an environmental engineer from the Santa Catarina State Department for Sustainable Economic Development who participated in the study. In Brazil, the bibliographies of the analyzed documents were composed of 69% gray literature written in Portuguese, 17% gray literature in English, 7% academic articles in English, and 7% academic articles in Portuguese (Nature Sustainability, March 16).
